TrainDad

This is the last part of a series.

What it really comes down to is this: with the Thomas sets, I get the feel­ing that the man­u­fac­tur­ers are using the Thomas brand to sell prod­uct. Noth­ing wrong with that; but with Geo­T­rax, the man­u­fac­turer doesn’t have that brand, so they have to make a supe­rior prod­uct that will sell on its own. And supe­rior it is, in a myr­iad of ways:

1. Fan­tas­tic track. This stuff is really sturdy and easy to use!
   • It’s super-easy to hook together, even for the youngest chil­dren. I’ve seen a 1-year-old do it.
   • Once hooked, it holds together well enough that you can lit­er­ally slide a lay­out across car­pet with­out it falling apart.
   • But when the time comes to recon­fig­ure or put it away, they pop apart eas­ily when you want them to.
   • It holds up to being stepped on, even on car­pet, with­out break­ing or dis­con­nect­ing (usually!).
   • The switches are easy to oper­ate, slide out of place less fre­quently (caus­ing fewer derail­ments), and look more realistic.
   • It’s real rail — train wheels really ride on flanges.
   • It’s pre­ci­sion made to min­i­mize derail­ments, and often can re-rail auto­mat­i­cally when they do happen.
   • It all inter­con­nects — all types, all bridges, all build­ings. This is not like the Tomy set where the road pieces are com­pletely sep­a­rate from the rail pieces.
2. Clever engi­neer­ing.
   • Pow­ered toys can also be hand-pushed (with­out strip­ping gears), even while turned on. Brilliant!
   • Gear-driven on uphills. This allows an engine to pull a long line of cars with­out the wheels slip­ping. Brilliant!
   • the same gear also dri­ves action on many build­ings — turn­ing a crane, load­ing a pipe, rotat­ing the turntable on the round­house. Bril­liant!
3. Well-thought-out and kid-tested.
   • Huge on/off but­ton right on top of the engines.
   • Sim­ple, effec­tive cou­pling sys­tem is easy to use. Yes­ter­day I saw my son uncou­ple a Tomy — he held the engine and shook it really hard until the cars flew off.
   • Easy-access bat­tery com­part­ments. Have you seen the ridicu­lous bat­tery extrac­tion on a Tomy Thomas?
4. Grows with the child.
   • From the sim­plest cir­cle of track to phe­nom­e­nally com­plex lay­outs designed in CAD and sold on eBay (make sure you watch the ani­mated build to see just how crazy it gets!), there’s no end to what you can do. Give teens a box of Geo­T­rax, and they love it. Moms admit addic­tion to it. It has end­less appeal.
   • From the sim­plest build­ings oper­a­ble by a 2-year-old to the crazy round­house that took me 10 min­utes to fig­ure out, there is a range of prod­ucts with a range of skill levels.
   • From sim­ple, easy-connecting hills to 19-foot-tall towers.
   • Still fun for big kids… really big kids, like, um, dads…
5. Excel­lent build qual­ity. Every piece is amaz­ing. Sturdy, durable, precise.
6. Cost. Any given piece costs less than a com­pa­ra­ble piece in any of the Thomas sets. The cheap­est items in the line are eas­ily found for $2.99, and they always include extras — in that exam­ple, you get a train engine, a gon­dola car, a crate, and a sec­tion of track. Beat that, Tommy!
7. Options.
   • Vehi­cle options like crazy:
     • unpow­ered, unpow­ered with lights and sound, pow­ered (which typ­i­cally come as part of a set), remote con­trol with forward/stop, remote con­trol with reverse.
     • not just trains: con­struc­tion equip­ment, fire, ambu­lance and police, air­planes and heli­copters, ships and snow­plows.
8. Yes, remote con­trol.
9. Sound effects. All of the remote-operated vehi­cles have digitally-recorded sounds from their real-life coun­ter­parts; you can play them at will.
10. Ele­va­tion! Multi-deck heights like nobody’s busi­ness! And don’t tell me you can do this with Tomy. I’ve seen the YouTube videos of peo­ple try­ing, but they don’t compare.
11. Speed! One of the sur­pris­ing bonuses I wasn’t expect­ing was the way trains hur­tle down hills. It’s excit­ing and unex­pected, and adds a whole new ele­ment of fun. For big kids and adults, a lot of the appeal is in try­ing to see how far you can push the enve­lope with­out the trains fly­ing com­pletely out of control.
12. Any toy that gets blogged on Wired must be cool.
13. And then gets a Wired writeup on hack­ing it. Even cooler.
14. New stuff added reg­u­larly. They are always improv­ing the prod­uct, and new releases are highly antic­i­pated. This year, for exam­ple, they are intro­duc­ing peo­ple — small, cleverly-designed fig­ures than fit into engines and other cars.

But when it all comes down to it, my son thinks it’s just more fun — and that’s good enough for me.